Building Successful Buy-and-Build Platforms: Alpine's Blueprint for Strategic M&A with Haley Van Cleve
Release Date: 07/28/2025
What Buyers Want from Bankers and Founders
M&A Science
Your standard teaser tells a buyer everything about your company and nothing about why you fit their strategy right now. When sellers expect the buyer to figure out that alignment, the deal dies on the desk. Andrew Morbitzer has led more than $2 billion in acquisitions at Intuit and GoDaddy, worked on the sell-side as an M&A advisor, and returned to the buy-side as VP of Corporate Development at Life360. What You'll Learn Why do corp dev teams default to no on inbound deals before the first conversation How banker incentives and buyer incentives point in opposite directions How to...
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220 Deals. One Playbook. How to Scale M&A Without Losing Control
M&A Science
If you scale the deal flow without the operating infrastructure to match it, things break fast. The playbook is a document nobody opens, closing weeks turn into fire drills, and the returns you modeled start to slip. Shawn Rodricks, Head of M&A - Independent Consultant, built the infrastructure before the volume hit. He closed 220 acquisitions across two organizations, 37 at Rexall in pharmacy and 183 at Amerivet Veterinary Partners, by wiring in the operating system from the start. What You'll Learn The five-part operating model behind 220 acquisitions How to hire for biz dev vs. corp...
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How to Build a Deal Model That Beats PE on Price
M&A Science
Buyers who mistake a high LOI bid for a winning strategy are easy prey for sellers who know the growth equity playbook. Jeremy Segal's position: precision at the LOI stage is a stronger differentiator than price. Jeremy Segal is EVP of Corporate Development at Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), a publicly traded software company that has nearly doubled revenue through M&A, from under $400 million to nearly $1 billion. He has closed roughly 50 acquisitions across his career at Progress, LogMeIn, and Akamai. How do you build a cost-optimization model before LOI for lines you know you can execute?...
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The People You Lose in M&A: Key Talent Retention Before Close
M&A Science
The people who leave post-close are usually the ones the deal depended on. Which means the problem starts with how you read culture before LOI and whether financial incentives are the only retention tool you are building with. Haseeb Jawad heads corporate development at Commvault, running a lean team with full accountability from sourcing through integration. He has led two to three acquisitions per year across multiple companies, sat on both sides of a transaction, and serves as his own IMO lead. The signals that tell you a deal will lose people are visible from the first founder...
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How to Buy Companies That Aren't Profitable Yet
M&A Science
Venture-backed companies are priced at their future state, not their current revenue. When growth stalls and another fundraising round stops making sense, the gap between VC valuation and what a strategic buyer will pay becomes the hardest conversation in any deal process. Matt Arsenault, VP of Corporate Development & Strategic Alliances at Jamf, has run this play across hundreds of targets. His work starts before the deal does, with the founder relationship, the cap table, and a clear-eyed conversation about risk tolerance that most corp dev teams never have. What You'll Learn ...
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When Deals Get Weird: Stories You Don't See in the CIM
M&A Science
, , , , , , , and Eight deal professionals share the M&A moments that never make the CIM. A birthday cake in a management presentation that confirmed a culture fit and influenced a bid. A buyer who died before close, forcing a nine-month restart from scratch. Eight years of customer revenue data on a 1980s IBM that management claimed did not exist. A target quietly heading toward Chapter 11 while diligence was underway. Unexpected events mid-deal are not exceptions. They are the deal. How you read them is what separates experienced practitioners from everyone else. What You'll Learn:...
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The Real Work Behind the Close: When Judgment Beats the Checklist
M&A Science
, , , , and Winning a banker-run auction at 5% under the highest bid. Closing a deal when co-sellers have not spoken in months. Getting through 22 countries of employment complexity with a client who refused to work with EOR providers. Acquiring a Netherlands-based public company and discovering the due diligence documents were in Dutch. These are the problems that no playbook prepares you for. Four corp dev professionals share how they handled them, and what it cost when they got it wrong. What You'll Learn How to win a competitive auction when you’re not the highest bidder What...
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The Nordic Compounder Playbook: How Jörgen Wigh Runs 85 Companies With 22 HQ Staff and No Integration
M&A Science
Lagercrantz Group has completed 90+ acquisitions over 20 years and never sold one. CEO Jörgen Wigh runs 85 niche B2B companies under a 22-person headquarters with no integration, no exits, and no value realization targets. This is Part 2 of 2. , while Part 2 is the operating culture. Jörgen gets into how 85 autonomous companies are governed without a matrix structure, why this model exists almost exclusively in the Nordics, what makes a founder walk away from a signed deal twice, why Lagercrantz deliberately targets a 10% failure rate, and what he would do differently starting from scratch...
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The Nordic Compounder Playbook: How Lagercrantz Bought 90 Companies and Never Sold One
M&A Science
Jörgen Wigh has been CEO of Lagercrantz Group (STO: LAGR-B) for over 20 years. In that time he completed 90+ acquisitions, built a portfolio of 85 niche B2B companies, and delivered 15 consecutive years of record earnings per share. No capital raises. No forced integration. No exits. The Nordic compounder model has quietly outperformed global markets for decades, and Lagercrantz is one of the longest-running, most disciplined examples of it in operation. In Part 1 of 2, Jörgen walks through the deal model behind that track record. What You'll Learn How Lagercrantz finds...
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M&A Integration Technology: What Actually Works
M&A Science
| | | Four integration leaders from Intel, Coursera, Ansys, and UKG debate what integration technology actually delivers versus what creates expensive overhead and where the real value leaks are. Todd Manley, Jim Buckley, Carey Pugh, and Mahesh Ganesan bring decades of deal experience to a conversation with no presentations and no curated answers. What You'll Learn Why the diligence-to-integration handoff keeps failing and what actually fixes it How to evaluate integration technology without getting sold on complexity Where AI is genuinely useful in integration today and where it is not...
info_outlineHaley Van Cleve, Partner at Alpine Investors
Haley joins us to decode the art of building successful buy-and-build platforms from the ground up. In this episode, Haley walks through Alpine's proven methodology for transforming small $3M EBITDA businesses into $100M+ platforms through strategic M&A and operational excellence. Learn how Alpine's unique talent model, integration-first approach, and buyer-led M&A strategy has driven over 850 deals, including 170 in 2024 alone. Whether you're a corporate development professional or private equity investor, this conversation delivers actionable insights on platform identification, integration best practices, and scaling through acquisitions.
Things you will learn:
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Alpine's team-market-business prioritization model for identifying $3M businesses with scaling potential
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Building 20-30 day system rollouts upfront to enable high-velocity acquisitions without operational breakdowns
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CEO-in-residence programs and profit interest pools that align management for long-term value creation
Episode Chapters
[00:02:30] Alpine's Evolution – From $400M Fund V to $4.5B today with 180+ team members across three offices
[00:04:30] Platform Definition – Why Alpine takes a liberal view of platforms, starting with $3M EBITDA businesses in fragmented markets
[00:07:30] Software vs. Services – Rule of 40 for software deals versus EBITDA-focused services acquisitions and different scaling approaches
[00:13:30] Legal Tech Case Study – Building a $4M revenue time-billing business into a $30M+ platform through four strategic add-ons
[00:16:00] Integration Excellence – People and systems integration within 20-30 days to maintain visibility during high-velocity M&A
[00:22:00] Vision Alignment – Setting clear expectations upfront about system standardization and operational changes before LOI
[00:25:00] Platform Challenges – Overhiring executive teams early and building integration capacity before closing deals
[00:36:00] In-House M&A Teams – When and how to build dedicated M&A functions at portfolio companies for double-digit acquisition strategies
[00:44:00] CEO-in-Residence Program – How Alpine hires executives before finding deals and pairs them with markets for 12+ month searches
[00:49:00] When Deals Go Sideways – COVID impact on K-12 businesses and pivoting M&A strategies when market assumptions prove wrong
Questions, comments, concerns?
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